Creative Work:

I had intended this semester to create a substantial body of experimental video work, but because of technological difficulties, I was only able to complete two of the projects, “The Lonely Bear,” and “of loss, of ruin.”  Upon the successful repair of my digital video camera, I expect to finish at least five more videos by the next residency.  With video work an impossibility, I turned my goal of “rigorous play” toward my creative writing and webdesign skills.  I’ve now completed a substantial amount of my latest novel.  I recently put the finishing touches on the code for three interactive new media projects at offensemechanism.com, “fragments,” “echoes,” and “faces.”  I consider these digital projects experimental because I’ve never before attempted to build artwork solely for an online audience, and it took quite a bit of self-education about the necessary coding to make these projects a reality.  They are all reminiscent of my video work in that they incorporate brooding soundtracks with haunting still images and text/dialogue taken from my personal interactions with people from my “real” life, but now those elements have been combined into audience-manipulated pieces that are displayed online for anyone with a reasonably-fast connection and computer to view.  I’ve also begun experimenting with new audio and video editing, composition, and manipulation programs in anticipation of creating more interactive online projects next semester.  A detailed listing of my creative work for the semester follows below.

Like last semester, the main thrust of my academic research was an intense reading of as many Samuel R. Delany books as I could, the end number being eight fiction and non-fiction texts, and a selection of critical analyses of Delany’s work by other leading authors in the speculative fiction and cultural studies fields.  My interest in Delany stems from his brilliant use of the language to explore issues of identity, sexuality, social spaces and the liminal areas where public and private collide, either in a science fiction context or in the many academic non-fiction essays he has written on issues from the revitalization of Times Square to the study of science fiction as a legitimate literary form itself.  Delany’s writing has been the most influential source of my own science fiction writing, a fluid exploration of language, a playful, lyrical juxtaposition of exposition and interior dialogue.  He uses writing fiction as a direct link to his own life, a way to exorcise demons, and in comparing and contrasting his fiction and non-fiction, I was able to see directly how close his works are linked to his real life, regardless of genre.  Researching Delany’s writing has helped me solidify my own exploration of personal issues through the synthesis of autobiography and science fiction.

I will admit that my research this semester was almost wholly Delany-centric.  I intend next semester to walk away from his work for a while and focus on other speculative fiction authors to gain a broader perspective of the contemporary field within which I’m attempting to contextualize my own work.

Like both of my previous semesters at Goddard, the seminar experience started out with a lot of promise, then seemed to fade away as people stopped posting and eventually mostly disappeared altogether.  This was particularly disappointing for me this semester, since I volunteered my time and bandwidth to construct and host a message board service for both the MFA-IA program as a whole and the individual advising groups.  I don’t think it was the format of the message boards that was an issue, since people seemed to abandon the email listserv as well.  I had hoped that people would be drawn to the boards as a safe space within which to both engage in meaningful intellectual discourse and strengthen those bonds we all feel of friendship at the residencies.  At least it gives me more food for thought about my personal research into the virtual/physical worlds conflict.

This semester, I conducted my practicum, which dealt with the issue of what happens when a virtual community suddenly becomes a physical community, and then what changes that transgression of worlds effect within the virtual community when we return from the physical.

Since 1996, I have run a network of webpages for writers and artists at resurrender.net.  From February 13-17, 2003, there was a resurrender.net convention in New Orleans, resurrender NOLA03, at which for the first time, members of the virtual community met face-to-face.  Members of the resurrender.net community came from all over the world, brought together by my desire to create a safe space online where people can openly explore the darker side of human nature in a supportive and non-judgmental environment.  

I felt it was an amazing opportunity to document the collision of virtual and physical worlds that has been an underlying theme of my Goddard study thus far.  I distributed digital video cameras among participants at the convention and had them record fifteen to twenty minutes each on the question of community: What is the meaning of community?  Is a virtual community a “legitimate” community?  What are the implications of bringing a virtual community into a physical space?  What changes occur within the virtual community after it has returned from that physical space?  

My role in this project was to be a facilitator of discussion about community and editor of the raw footage.  This practicum is a stretch for me because I have never before acted in the role of facilitator when working with digital video; my projects have always been intensely personal, and I’ve always taken all my own footage and done all of my own editing.  Relying on other people’s footage and using the voices of others will be an interesting and truthfully, daunting departure from my usual practice.  

I have created a forum at illout.com where I’ve begun to document the process of gathering and editing together footage taken at resurrender NOLA03 and offer suggestions and assistance to the participants as technical issues arise.

As facilitator of the project and editor of the final product, it is my duty to use my unique abilities in the medium to express the views of participants from around the world in an honest and creative manner that will hold meaning not only for the resurrender.net community, but in a broader sense, anyone interested in this documentation of the transgression of virtual and physical worlds.

I intend to have the final video documentation of NOLA03 ready for viewing at the summer residency.

Webdesign:

• hughesonline.org
• http://www.hughesonline.org
• Site in development.  Intended to be an online presence for my nuclear family.  I’ve begun using online resources to trace the Hughes family history.  Site will feature space for family members to have their own pages.  Site will act as an online gathering place for an increasingly-globally-dispersed family.

• samueldelany.com
• http://www.samueldelany.com
• Site in development.  Currently features links to Delany books online, my own musings about the author, a bibliography and a short biography.  I hope to contact and involve Delany in the development of this site, as well as inviting other Delany enthusiasts to participate in an online dialogue (via illout.com message boards) about his work.

• fragments
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/fragments01.html
• Interactive new media experiment.  This project relies on the audience’s willingness to explore the pages, to click on the images, to dig deeper.  The overall mood of “fragments” is that of loss, of uncertainty.  The viewer is only given limited details on the relationships presented.  There are no explicit meanings; the viewer must come up with her own conclusion as to what happened.

• echoes
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/echoes01.htm
• “Echoes” is primarily an interactive audio composition composed of nine vocal tracks and two musical tracks.  My intention with this project was to attempt to re-create the inside of my brain, what I hear when I try to sleep at night, the waves and floods of voices that prevent sleep and force me to intense introspection.  I’ve given the audience the opportunity to control and manipulate that flood.  A listener could activate all of the audio tracks at once and create the complete audio flood, or just activate one or two and listen to them loop, an auditory dance that is ever-changing, ever-shifting as the varying lengths of the files cause different “compositions” each time they repeat.  This is a project with only a fractional mathematical possibility of repeating itself noticeably to the listener.

• faces
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/faces01.html
• Unlike the previous two projects that I’ve made for offmech this semester, “faces” is a pretty straight-forward visual piece.  There’s nothing complicated about it.  It’s an image slideshow that depicts the physical evolution of myself from the day I was born until the day that I uploaded the project.  I plan to continue to add more images periodically.  This project will in essence not be completed until I’ve died and I’m no longer able to photograph myself and upload the images, or until the apes take over civilization and shut off the internet.

• Phones.
• http://www.resurrender.com/phones01mp3.mp3
• Composition created from the combination of a looped message a young woman left on my answering machine and Arvo Part’s minimalist piece, “Silouans Song.”  I’m considering using Phones as the soundtrack to a future video composition.

• The Lonely Bear
• http://www.resurrender.com/bear/index.html
• http://www.resurrender.com/bearhighband01.mpg
• A puppet video starring a teddy bear who wants some friends, set to a somber Arvo Part minimalist composition and Hindustani pop music.

• of loss, of ruin.
• http://www.resurrender.com/oflossofruin01.mpg
• This is an experiment in which I played with the alignment of still images to changes in the soundtrack.

• journal: wars of desire and technology. (http://www.dyingdays.com/paul.html)
• My online journal from the literary site dyingdays.com.

• broken tomorrows (http://www.silverthought.com/paulhughes.html)
• This semester, I continued writing my third science fiction novel, broken tomorrows, the final entry in my silverthought series.

• Delany, Samuel R. Atlantis: Three Tales. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan, 1995.
• Delany, Samuel R. Captives of the Flame. New York, NY: Ace Books, 1963.
• Delany, Samuel R. The Fall of the Towers. New York: Ace, 1966.
• Delany, Samuel R. The Jewels of Aptor. New York, NY: Bantam, 1982.
• Delany, Samuel R. The Mad Man. New York: Richard Kasak, 1994.
• Delany, Samuel R. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & The Politics of the Paraliterary. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan, 1999.
• Delany, Samuel R. Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. New York: Bantam, 1984.
• Delany, Samuel R. They Fly At Ciron. New York, NY: Tor, 1993.
• Merritt, Natacha. Digital Diaries. New York: Taschen, 2000.
• Rutsky, R. L.  High Techne: Art and Technology From the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
• Schaffner, Ingrid.; Winzen, Matthias., et alii. Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art. Munich; New York: Prestel, 1998.

It was my main goal for my G3 semester to focus on my advisor Pam Hall’s concept of “rigorous play.”  That is, I had intended to produce several dozen shorter video projects that would return to the playful exploration of the digital medium instead of focusing solely on a particular issue, as my previous projects had dealt with loss, suicide, resignation, and surrender.  I had planned in essence to take a creative step backwards to “play” with the medium so that I might incorporate what I found during a less-structured exploration of digital video into future projects.

Then my camera broke.

It’s difficult to make video projects without a camera.  I had it repaired.  I used the two weeks before it broke again to frantically assemble two videos, “The Lonely Bear” and “of loss, of ruin.”  As I write this, the camera has been in the repair shop since mid-March, with the replacement firewire card on backorder until May 20th.  During the course of the semester, I’ve made preliminary plans for several video projects, and I intend to complete them once the camera is returned, in time for the summer residency.

Although the goal of “rigorous play” with video was pretty much a bust, I am pleased with the two videos that I did complete in the window of time that my camera actually worked this semester.  They’re unlike my previous projects in that one is decidedly comedic and stars a teddy bear, and the other was an experiment in matching still images to a ready-made soundtrack.  I’m not pleased with the quantity of work I did, but I am pleased with the quality of the videos I completed.

Another goal I set was to do a substantial amount of creative writing in my new novel, broken tomorrows.  In a sense, my creative writing is where I focused the most on rigorous play this semester.  My new book is a combination of two previous novels, drawing characters from both books, my real life, and a new world that I’ve written into existence as a synthesis of both.  broken tomorrows presents many opportunities to discuss and explore issues of subjective identity formation, virtual versus physical worlds, and the issue of incorporating autobiography into fiction.  I’m learning to play with the language, adopting a poetic, lyrical style in places, bending the narrative to include multiple viewpoints and shifting active narrators, and generally just trying to have fun with what I write.

It was another goal of my semester to continue my intense study of Samuel R. Delany’s body of work.  I’ve definitely achieved that goal, having read eight more of his speculative fiction novels and nonfiction academic studies.  I intend to be a well-versed premiere Delany scholar by the time I leave Goddard, and I feel I’m well on my way, having now read everything of his that is still available and still in print.

It was also my goal this semester to conduct my practicum, which I did from February 13-17, 2003 at the resurrender.net NOLA03 convention in New Orleans.  Details provided in the appropriate entry above.

If anything, this semester has forced me to re-evaluate my art in terms of technological feasibility.  With a broken camera just about ruining the main goal I had set for the semester, to engage in a rigorous, playful experimentation of the possibilities of the digital video medium, I was forced to turn elsewhere to create, focusing instead on my creative writing, my web design, and my Delany research.  There are elements of playfulness in both my writing and my new media projects.  I am disappointed that I wasted time waiting for the camera to get back that might better have been spent channeling creative energies into other media.  The truth is, I’m afraid that my failure to achieve the main goal of my semester will be a hindrance to my Goddard education in that I’m running out of time before G5 to develop a fundamental knowledge base of the contemporary artistic community within which I’m hoping to situate myself.  I’m disappointed that I might have squandered this great opportunity to work with Pam Hall because I had very little video to show her.  I’m hoping to be able to work with her in my G4 semester to finally get a chance for that “rigorous play” in video that we had so hoped would be the highlight of my semester.

I’m not going to completely discount this semester as lost; I know that I did a substantial amount of valid creative work in writing and web design, and I’ll place my Delany-focused speculative fiction research up there against anyone’s.  It’s just difficult to consider myself a video artist when I’ve done so little video yet this year.  The temporary loss of the camera has, however, forced me to look down avenues of exploration that I might otherwise have ignored, such as my new-found fascination with interactive new media projects online, a medium that I plan to further develop in my next semester.  I can no longer paint myself into the corner of “video artist,” when I know that I’m capable of so much more than that.

All in all, I feel it was a successful semester in most regards, although stippled with technological and emotional disappointments.  I’m a valid new media artist.  I just need to start doing and stop dreaming so much.

I look forward to pushing the boundaries of my abilities again next semester.